Natural language processing and dialogue system, such as chatbots, are now becoming commonplace in many fields. Natural language processing relates to how computers process and analyse natural language data. Dialogue systems (or conversational agents) are computer systems intended to converse with humans in a coherent manner. Naturally, such systems are heavily dependent on their accuracy in recognising input text.
Whilst dialogue systems have become more effective in recent years, such systems are not perfect. The ramifications of giving an incorrect answer by a dialogue system to a question relating to directions or re-directing a call in an automated computer system are annoying, but unlikely to cause serious distress.
There is a much larger challenge to implement a dialogue system in a medical setting as incorrect advice could potentially have disastrous results. For this reason, dialogue systems that are deployed to give medical information are strictly controlled to give advice that is validated by a medical professional. Having said this, a user of a medical dialogue system may express their symptoms in many different ways and the validation by a medical professional must be able to cover all inputs. Also, validation by a medical expert is a long process and repetition of the validation process should be minimised.
There is therefore a need for improve natural language processing, particularly in the field of dialogue systems for providing medical information.